Quotes About Identity

The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called 'Make Up' thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.

She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him.

It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home. And connected to home was a question I swatted away every time it landed too near me. Who else was living with me in the grand old house with the pomegranate tree? Was I alone with the melancholy fountain for company? No. There was definitely someone else there with me, perhaps even cooling their feet in that fountain. Who was this person? A phantom.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be

I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.

She is drinking peach tea in the plaza and she is too hot because her blue and black checked shirt is for winter not for summer in Andalucía. I think she thinks she's a cowboy in her work shirt, always alone with no one to look at the mountain horizon at night and say my god those stars.

I had lost my job. I was no longer officially a minor historian. Perhaps I was history itself, flailing around in a number of directions, sometimes all of them at the same time.

Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children.

I wasn't sure my skeletal system had found a way of walking freely in the Societal System

So do you anthropologists study primitive people?' 'Yes, but the only primitive person I have ever studied is myself.

Mitt problem är att jag vill röka cigarren själv och att någon annan ska tända den åt mig. Jag vill blåsa ut röken. Som en vulkan. Som ett monster. Jag vill att det ska ryka om mig. Jag vill inte vara flickan vars jobb det är att jämra sig me gäll röst på begravningar.

The face beneath the mask has to grow seamlessly into the mask.

My mother's words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.

She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be.

To do the things she had chosen to do in the world, she risked forfeiting her place as a wife and mother, a bewildering place haunted by all that had been imagined for her if she chose to sit in it.

I felt at ease with myself, which must have meant that she did not regard me as strange and so I had no reason to imitate someone who was less strange and had been saved from doing the chameleon thing.

British literary landscape,

He did not ask me one single question, not even my name. It seemed that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side to acquire his canapes for him and who understood that he was entirely the subject.

I wanted to die of shame but everyone insisted on keeping me alive. I had to live.

Cuando una mujer tiene que encontrar una forma nueva de vivir y rompe con la historia social que ha borrado su nombre, se espera que se odie a sí misma atrozmente, que enloquezca de dolor, que llore arrepentida. Son las joyas reservadas para ella en la corona del patriarcado, siempre a su disposición. No faltan las lágrimas, pero es mejor atravesar la oscuridad negra y azulada que quedarse con esas joyas que nada valen

In her view, this is because a man's love of a woman is not what gives him his self-worth. I was no longer interested in exploring this kind of dynamic in

I was thinking of Hecate at the crossroads with her burning torches and keys, Medusa with her snakes and fatal gaze, Artemis with her hunting dogs and deer, Aphrodite with her doves, Demeter with her mares, Athena with her owl. Whenever I saw eccentric and sometimes mentally fragile older women feeding pigeons on the pavement of every city in the world, I thought, Yes, there she is, she is one of those cut-down goddesses who has become demented by life.

To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents.

Next to me she seems like a clean blackboard, whereas I am full of crossed-out scribbles that I can no longer decipher.